Dorothy Brush "Random Thoughts" Published June 22, 2005

Nature is full of entertainment

Do youngsters still find joy in looking at the sky to find cloud pictures? One of my favorite pastimes was to stretch out on the grass and search the skies in the daytime. It was even more exciting at night when the Milky Way and twinkling stars filled the deep darkness unspoiled by street lights.

Last fall, I was driving on a street I traveled regularly. As I passed a patch of forest that had dropped all its leaves I thought I saw something new. I turned around and backtracked to be sure. There, on a tall stately tree, was the head of a deer with a perfect face and antler branches.

It was so perfect my first thought was that someone had carved it. After studying it I knew it had been carved by nature.

Some months later I was working at my typewriter when I stopped to think and as my eyes traveled the scene in my backyard I found another work of art done by nature. The stump of a fallen tree had been transformed into an upright bear cub.

A favorite activity for youngsters is finding objects hidden in a picture. The objects are listed and the youngster has fun finding them. Their sharp eyes could find many interesting pictures on a nature walk.

Recently forest faces have appeared for sale. Made of durable polyresin they can be attached to a tree to make a humorous face. The kits include eyes, nose and mouth.

Another joy of summertime is the appearance of the nocturnal beetle called firefly, glow-worm and lightning bugs. They fill the darkness with bright flashes used to attract a mate. It wasn't until the 1980s that scientists found out just how this tiny creature produced the light.

At Purdue University a study found there were two chemicals in the abdomen of the firefly which when combined with oxygen which the creature controls by regulating the air it takes in, results in energy which produces a cold light. The two chemicals named lucifern and luciferase refer to Lucifer, "the fallen angel of light."

The term for this phenomenon is bioluminescence and the firefly is not alone in having this ability. In the ocean a microscopic, single-celled, plant-like organism drifts around plankton and when threatened they use this same method. They flash a blue-green light to attract a second predator to take care of the first predator.

But back to the firefly. These fascinating beetles are found on every continent except Antarctica. In the United States, they live east of the Mississippi River and are not found west of the Rocky Mountains. In our country there are 170 species, but worldwide the number jumps to 1,900.

Not only youngsters are fascinated with the firefly. Earlier this month adults jammed the roads in the Elkmont Historic District of the Smokies to get a look at the flashes of a unique species of firefly that blinks in unison during the mating ritual.

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Dorothy Copus Brush is a Fairfield Glade resident and Crossville Chronicle staffwriter whose column is published each Wednesday.